Coming Fury, Volume 1 (71 page)

When the attack at last was made it failed miserably. Young Theodore Winthrop, the ardent New Englander who had thought that the joy of marching down Broadway under the flags was worth life itself, tried to lead an assault through a swamp; waved his sword, shouted “Come on, boys—one more charge and the day is ours!” and was immediately shot to death. Lieutenant J. T. Greble, of the regular artillery, was killed, the first regular-army officer to die in this war, working his guns while the Confederates squatted in the underbrush and maintained a relentless fire; their commander wrote that they “seemed to enjoy it as much as boys do rabbit shooting.” In the end the Federals fled back to their base, utterly routed, leaving seventy-six dead and wounded men behind them. The Confederates had lost but eight, and trophies from the battlefield were displayed in Richmond shop windows to delight the patriotic.
¹

The situation on the Virginia peninsula remained precisely as it had been before, but the situation in Washington began to change. Was the war not being bungled? There had been riots in Baltimore; now there was humiliating defeat on the battlefield; a fortnight earlier there was the death of Elmer Ellsworth, arousing powerful emotions; and on the heels of all of this there came McClellan’s advance in the west, a demonstration, apparently, that when things were handled with energy, the war news could be good. Lincoln’s secretaries wrote afterward that “overstrained enthusiasm was slowly changing into morbid sensitiveness and a bitterness of impatience which seemed almost beyond endurance.” Before long, Horace Greeley’s New York
Tribune
was repeating “Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond!” demanding that the Confederate capital be taken before the Confederate Congress could assemble on July 20. Opinionated Count Gurowski spoke for many when he wrote, with all the certainty of the doctrinaire: “The people’s
strategy is best; to rush in masses on Richmond; to take it now, when the enemy is there in comparatively small numbers.… So speaks the people, and they are right; here among the wiseacres not one understands the superiority of the people over his little brain.”
²

To rush in masses upon Richmond might be well, provided the masses were in shape to make the rush, although the ghost of Theodore Winthrop could have testified that something more than enthusiasm was needed. General Scott had a better grasp of the matter. Understanding something of the way in which wars are won, he had worked out a plan to win this one—a plan whose essentials, finally applied, would at last actually win it—but the rising tension all around him would compel him to resort to expedients. Doubting that the thing could be done all in a rush, he began to seem unduly cautious and slow; a failing made even worse by his belief that Richmond was not really the best place to rush upon anyway.

Scott put his plan together early in the spring, the genesis of it, apparently, being a letter from General McClellan. McClellan wrote to him on April 27, suggesting that the nation’s major offensive effort be made from the Middle West. Hold the line of the Ohio and the upper Mississippi firmly (said McClellan) and then, with an army of at least 80,000 men, strike eastward by way of the Great Kanawha Valley to Virginia and Richmond, or possibly drive down across Tennessee toward Montgomery. This, he said, could be combined with a thrust by an eastern army through Charleston and on into Georgia, the ultimate goal of everybody being the Gulf Coast and the cities of Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans. McClellan thought all of this should be done quickly. (“The movement on Richmond,” he wrote, in words that may have returned to haunt him a year later, “should be conducted with the utmost promptness.”)

Scott replied on May 3. His chief objection to this plan, he said, was that it proposed to subdue the seceded states by piecemeal, instead of overwhelming them in one broad, co-ordinated campaign. He pointed out, also, that the government was going to rely on three-year volunteers instead of on the ninety-day militia regiments; there would be time, therefore, to organize properly for the long pull. Then he set forth his own scheme: blockade the
Confederate coast rigorously, send a powerful army (accompanied by gunboats) down the Mississippi, seize New Orleans with an amphibious expedition coming up from below, and establish a firm grip on the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf. The object of this, he wrote, was “to clear out and keep open this great line of communication … so as to envelop the insurgent states and bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan.” It would be necessary to give the volunteers at least four and one-half months of training, river gunboats must be built, and much equipment would have to be assembled; Scott believed that the big drive down the river could not begin before the middle of November. Then he added a note of warning:

“A word now as to the greatest obstacle in the way of this plan—the great danger now pressing upon us—the impatience of our patriotic and loyal Union friends. They will urge instant and vigorous action, regardless, I fear, of consequences.”
³

They were already doing it, although the pressure for instant and vigorous action, strong enough even then to worry General Scott, was nothing compared with what it would be by July. It would become something Federal officers would feel all through the war; McClellan himself would be under its crudest compulsion before the year was out, and any general who at any time seemed reluctant to rush in masses, pell-mell, upon the enemy would risk intense criticism and the loss of his job. Even now Scott could feel it, and could see that it was going to increase—one indication being the reception his plan got. President Lincoln liked it, to be sure; the more so, perhaps, because he was a Westerner who knew the profound importance of the Mississippi Valley. Other people, however, did not. The proposal leaked out, military secrets at that time being less than sacred, and it brought Scott a good deal of derision. Newspapers called it “the Anaconda plan,” and something about the picture of heavy serpentine coils slowly constricting the life out of the enemy struck many patriots as ridiculous. There was no dash to it, nothing to stir the pulses; it had no room for “Forward to Richmond” or for the decisive rush of inspired masses, and the last thing anyone wanted to think about was the prospect of a long war.

The business began to come to a head late in June, when General
McDowell submitted a plan of operations to the War Department.

McDowell was not concerned with broad strategy. He commanded what was called the Department of Northeastern Virginia, with headquarters at Arlington, in the pillared house occupied until recently by Robert E. Lee, and he knew that he was expected to take action against the enemy in his immediate front. This enemy was General Beauregard, who had an army drawn up in front of Manassas Junction, thirty-odd miles from Washington, behind a sluggish stream known as Bull Run. McDowell had nothing resembling an adequate staff, but his intelligence service was good, and he had an only mildly exaggerated count of Beauregard’s numbers: about 25,000 of all arms, he believed, with perhaps 10,000 more up in the Shenandoah Valley led by Joe Johnston. Since there was a railroad line from Manassas to the Valley, Johnston could quickly come to Beauregard’s aid when the Yankees moved. Let the Federals along the upper Potomac, then, keep Johnston so busy that he could send no help; McDowell himself, with 30,000 men in column and another 10,000 in reserve, could march down to give Beauregard a battle.

McDowell’s plan was a workmanlike job. He knew that his militia regiments were poorly trained and, in almost all cases, were commanded by men totally without experience in war. He would organize them, therefore, into small brigades (which later would be grouped into divisions), each brigade to be led by a regular-army colonel, each colonel to be assisted by as many junior regulars as might be available, “so that the men may have as fair a chance as the nature of things and the comparative inexperience of most will allow.” He had no grandiose ideas about taking Richmond; he said flatly that “the objective point in our plan is Manassas Junction,” and because he felt that his raw troops would be more likely to stick together in advance than in retreat, he specified that once the move began, there should be no backward step. On June 29 Lincoln called his cabinet and his military advisers to the White House to consider this plan.

General Scott did not like it. Repeating what he had told McClellan, he told Lincoln that he “did not believe in a little war by piece-meal”; he wanted the Anaconda scheme, with the decisive campaign going down the Mississippi in the autumn—“fight all the
battles that were necessary, take all the positions we could find and garrison them, fight a battle at New Orleans and win it, and thus end the war.” He leaned, it must be confessed, on the old delusion: the South contained many Union men, and these would come forward once the Mississippi was opened and the blockade was made tight, and “I will guarantee that in one year from this time all difficulties will be settled.” In any case, Scott’s program looked too remote. President and cabinet clearly wanted action now, in Virginia, and Scott withdrew his opposition and listened while McDowell laid a map on the table and explained just what he proposed to do. McDowell’s exposition was soldierly and lucid, and his plan was approved. He was told to start his forward movement on July 9.
⁴

This would crowd things, July 9 being only ten days away. Haste seemed necessary, however, because in about a fortnight the ninety-day terms of many of the militia regiments would begin to expire; better use the men while they were still available. In the end the target date proved unattainable. New regiments were still coming in, including some of the three-year volunteers, and it took time to fit them into the new army’s organization. It took even more time to find all of the wagons, horses, and harness for the supply trains. McDowell had only eight companies of cavalry and practically no engineer troops; and, all in all, there was a good deal of point in Scott’s notion that the summer ought to be spent in the slow task of getting ready. It would be several days after July 9 before McDowell could get his unwieldy force on the road.

If this force were to do its job, the Confederate army in the Shenandoah had to be kept out of action, and this was up to Major General Robert Patterson, who had some 14,000 troops in Maryland along the upper Potomac in the general vicinity of Hagerstown. Patterson was sixty-nine, a veteran of the War of 1812 and of the Mexican War. He came from the militia rather than from the regulars, and he had spent most of his life as a businessman, successful and prosperous; he owned sugar and cotton plantations in the South and textile mills in the North, he had helped to promote the Pennsylvania Railroad, and he had interests in Philadelphia steamship lines, and he was on duty now as a major general of volunteers, serving a three-month term like the rest of the militia. Handicapped though he was by age, he was a stout old smooth-bore, and in the
middle of June he had wanted to cross the Potomac and clear the lower Shenandoah Valley of Rebels at least as far as Winchester. Scott turned down his plan rather brusquely, took the few regulars Patterson had away from him, and sent a series of rather confused orders which left the old general somewhat muddled.

In the end Patterson got the picture: McDowell was going to advance, and Patterson was to keep Johnston occupied. The picture was still fuzzy, however. Scott seemed to be saying that Patterson must fight Johnston but that he must be very careful, and if it was too risky to pursue the enemy, he ought to think about coming down the Potomac Valley toward McDowell instead; the sum of it seemed to be (as far as Patterson could see) that he was to make warlike demonstrations and delay the enemy, but that he was not to take undue chances. A reverse or even a drawn battle would encourage the enemy, “filling his heart with joy, his ranks with men and his magazines with voluntary contributions.” The two old generals, conferring along the length of the telegraph wire, just were not getting through to one another.
⁵

The Confederates were suffering from a little confusion of their own, although in the end this was not so expensive. Early in June, Beauregard had written to President Davis urging that they work out a detailed strategic plan, but Davis warned him that because they were so outnumbered they must first see what the Yankees were up to; “the present position and unknown purpose of the enemy require that our plan should have many alterations.” The unknown purpose became clear enough before long. Beauregard had plenty of spies in Washington and they kept him posted, and anyway the Northern newspapers were printing detailed stories telling what McDowell was going to do, and Beauregard soon was very well aware that he was about to be attacked. Full of expedients, he laid plans for his battle—Napoleonic plans, based, as he said, on what Napoleon did at Austerlitz. They were excellent, although as things worked out no single part of them could ever be put into operation. Beauregard’s role was simply to hold on and stand the hammering until Johnston could join him.
⁶

Johnston, on his part, was suffering from some unease. McClellan seemed about to break through the mountains from the west, and Patterson might cross the Potomac in force at any
minute; and although Lee warned him that to give up Harper’s Ferry “would be depressing to the cause of the South,” Johnston considered the place indefensible—and on June 15 he evacuated the historic little town and retreated to Winchester. (Patterson considered this a ruse. An outpost commander warned him that “there may be a deep-laid plot to deceive us,” and Patterson wired Scott: “Design no pursuit; cannot make it.”) Johnston reconsidered a little, after his retreat, and moved twelve miles forward to Bunker Hill, where he took position and regained a measure of confidence. The threat from McClellan evaporated, and Johnston watched to see what the Federals might do next.
⁷

He was well served by his lieutenants. One of them was that singular genius, Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson, a shy man full of ferocious Presbyterianism, born to fight; and Jackson put over a sly trick on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad people, confiscating trains that ran through Harper’s Ferry and depriving the road at last of forty-two locomotives and 386 freight cars. Most of these were wrecked and thrown into the river, but Jackson was able to haul fourteen locomotives and a few boxcars overland, by road, with horses for motive power, all the way to the town of Strasburg, where they could be put on the Manassas Gap Railroad and added to the Confederacy’s stock of railroad equipment.
⁸
Johnston also had some cavalry, commanded by a bearded young West Pointer named James Ewell Brown Stuart—Jeb Stuart, who would be known to fame a little later, a man who was both an unconscionable show-off and a solid, hard-working, and wholly brilliant commander of light horse. He wore an ostrich plume in his hat, he had a gray cloak lined with scarlet, and he kept a personal banjo player on his staff, riding off to war all jingling with strum-strum music going on ahead, and before he got killed (which came in the final twilight several years later) he gave the Yankees a very bad time of it. Johnston used Stuart these days to befuddle the already confused General Patterson, and no one could have done it better.